29 UKRAINIAN MEDIA LANDSCAPE - 2017 OLEKSII MATSUKA SERHII TOMILENKO OLEKSII POHORELOV OLES HOIAN ANDRII YURYCHKO TETIANA LEBEDIEVA VITALII MOROZ UKRAINIAN MEDIA LANDSCAPE -2017 Konrad Adenauer Foundation, The Academy of Ukrainian Press. (2017). Ukrainian media land- scape -2017. Analytical report. Ivanov V.F. (Ed.). Kyiv. Ukrainian media landscape -2017 is analytical report dwelling on the development dynamics of Ukrainian media outlets for the period of 2016-2017, a survey of Ukraine's media institutions and market. Prominent experts in the field became the authors of publication. Published with the support of Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Responsibility for the information set out in this report lies entirely with the authors. Cover Photo: GETTY © П редставництво Ф о н д у К о н р а д а а д е н а у е р а в у К р а ї н і , 2 0 1 7 Ф о н д К о н р а д а а д е н а у е р а в у л . а К а д е м і К а Б о г о м о л ь ц я , 5 , о Ф . 1 0 1 0 2 4 , К и ї в w w w . k a s . d e / u k r a i n e o f f i c e . u k r a i n e @ k a s . d e 2 CONTENTS FOREWORD (GABRIELE BAUMANN) ............................................................................ 4 EDITOR’s noTE (VALERIY IVANOV) ........................................................................... 6 SECTION 1. MEDIA COVERAGE AT THE TIME OF WAR IN UKRAINE ................................ 8 UKRAINIAN JOURNALISM IN THE POST-TRUTH ERA (OLEKSII MATSUKA) ........................................................ 8 «HIDDEN» IMPUNITY FOR CRIMES AGAINST JOURNALISTS (SERHII TOMILENKO) ...................................................... 12 SECTION 2. PRINTED MEDIA .................................................................................. 14 DENATIONALIZATION OF PRESS: A CHANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT VS. FORCE OF INERTIA (OLEKSII POHORELOV) ..................................................... 14 SECTION 3. RADIO BROADCASTING ....................................................................... 21 UKRAINIAN RADIO: NEW CALL SIGNS (OLES HOIAN) ............................................. 21 SECTION 4.TELEVISION ........................................................................................ 27 NEWS, ORIGINAL TV PRODUCTION, INVESTIGATIVE PROGRAMS AND FUN SHOWS: THE CHOICE OF TV VIEWERS IN 2016-2017 (ANDRII YURYCHKO) ........................... 27 PUBLIC BROADCASTING IN UKRAINE: HARD WAY TO IMPORTANT CHANGES (TETIANA LEBEDIEVA) ................................... 32 SECTION 5. ONLINE AND SOCIAL MEDIA ................................................................. 36 ONLINE AND SOCIAL MEDIA OF Ukraine, 2016–2017 (VITALII MOROZ) .................. 36 ABOUT THE AUTHORS ........................................................................................... 44 3 FOREWORD Konrad Adenauer Mission in Ukraine has been supporting the release of analytical report “Ukrainian Media Landscape” for 7 years long. The idea of this project appeared in Autumn, 2010 during the “Independent Media” working group meeting (Working group: democracy, human rights, good governance and sta- bility) of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum in Brussels and Berlin. Media experts from six countries of the Eastern Partnership made a decision that the main priority is preparation of the media roadmap for the Eastern Partnership countries-participants. The first step to this became preparation of analytical media landscape reports for each country. Having analyzed the media situation in each country, common problematic areas were defined, and the activity on their solving is going on, joining efforts, knowledge and experience as well as the influence of international institutions for the lobbying particular decisions. Current tendencies of media environment development are articulated for Ukrainian experts, and general features of media situation in the country are provided for international readers by Media Landscape. All this time we have been successively realizing the project “Ukrainian Media Land- scape” in cooperation with our partner, the Academy of Ukrainian Press. Such activity always causes a good public response, and the publication is in a great demand. It has been issued once in two years in Ukrainian and in English and consists of articles written by Ukrainian prominent media experts, university professors and journalists specializing in different areas of media activity. After 4 years after Euromaidan, Ukraine’s politics and social life have changed signifi- cantly. The task of media at this time was not only observing all the aspects of these changes but also broad and objective coverage. This is a hard task when the number of topics is in- creasing and people are expecting broader and better media coverage. It is worth mentioning that such important processes as European integration of the country, specific ecology and climate change topics, and, certainly, complex economy, financial and regional development re- forms should be covered. Journalists should regularly increase their professional level in order competently to assess the events. Coverage of military actions is one more field of coverage that became relevant in terms of the conflict in the East. 4 Due to the increase of challenges, re-training journalists remains an exclusively impor- tant issue that is addressed by the Foundation and AUP making their small but regular con- tribution by conducting seminars within the project “School of Social Journalists”. However, we have to understand that journalists work in different media structures and the potential of reforming there is still different. There have been numerous discussions on the reform of public broadcasting for the recent years, and now we can see the results. This problem is also men- tioned in the publication. Having been residing, working and observing the events in Ukraine since 2012, I feel myself well informed due to printed media and Internet that provide a pluralistic coverage all this time. However, the same still does not concern television where high-quality documentary and objective news issues are rather rare. “Ukrainian Media Landscape - 2017” gives an answer to the reasons for misbalance in objective coverage of events by particular media outlets and provides the ways of approaching to the world journalistic standards. Mass media as “the forth estate” play truly a great role in life of each environment performing the functions of informing, making opinions and realization of control. The key to this can be independence of media that can be achieved due to the increase of political culture among citizens, reforming media environment under the pressure of civil society and imple- menting the rational financial models of media functioning. I wish all Ukrainian and English speaking readers fascinating time while learning our publication! Gabriele Baumann Director of Konrad Adenauer Mission to Ukraine Kyiv, December 2017 5 EDITOR’S NOTE Valeriy Ivanov, President of the Academy of Ukrainian Press, Doctor of Philology, Professor Ukraine is experiencing the difficult times of its turning to a democratic state. The choice of the Ukrainian people in favor of the western civilization model caused a strong resistance of Russia and those Ukrainian citizens who support the eastern vector of development. This re- sulted in an open conflict. Moreover, the annexation of Crimea, the war in the East led not only to significant human and territorial losses, but, alas, tolerating the violations of fundamental freedoms and human rights, in particular freedom of expression. The main points regarding the freedom of expression decrease in Ukraine include: the restriction of access to information channels (Russian books, TV channels, films, social networks, mail servers, etc.); persecution, in particular the detention and imprisonment of citizens ex- pressing separatist views in social networks; a mass prohibition on Russian journalists entering Ukraine, and those who were on temporarily uncontrolled territory (Crimea and Donbas). This is especially true for those who arrived in the area from the Russian Federation. In addition to this, so-called “patriotic” or loyalty-journalism became active as some jour- nalists believe that in terms of war it is more important to participate in the information war against the enemy than just to be non-biased. Here also belong the calls not to criticize the authorities during war period, and the prolonged understatement of crimes committed by indi- vidual fighters of volunteer battalions. This led to a rapid fall of trust to Ukrainian media. Accord- ing to the Institute of Sociology, the National Academy of Science of Ukraine, in 2016, only 21% of Ukrainian citizens trusted domestic media, while 51% did not. However, Ukrainian journalists should clearly understand their social role. In general, Niclas Louman is right, saying that we know about the world is taken from media. But if the media give a biased image, the audience will stop trusting. This is so, if a person is looking be- hind the window, and observes a different situation from that one previously watched or read. The audience is not helpless. It is possible to cheat on people once or twice but after all they will not believe this source of information anymore. This is a real tragedy for media as they lose the sense of existing. Thus, the goal of media as the information source is not just to report all recent news to the target audience, but also to ensure that the virtual picture of the world cor- responds to the real one. 6 The main function of media is informing. If journalists